Long DNA has arrived.   Elegen, a new company based in San Carlos, California,  is out this year offering just long DNA.  According to their founder and CEO, Matt Hill and today's guest, the company’s product is twenty times more accurate than anything else presently available. What does this mean for the world of biology and the world in general that we're seeing the emergence of a new subindustry devoted specifically to long DNA?

"We’re not a sequencing company," says Molly He, CEO and co-founder of Element Biosciences in our first interview with the leader of the hot new sequencing company which seemed to come out of nowhere this past year. “We’re a biology company.” Not a sequencing company? Element has just taken the lead in the race toward cheap clinical genomes, and their CEO is putting that news aside in today’s interview. Instead, she’s much more interested in touting the company’s core technology “avidity.” The term comes from a core reagent the company has labeled an “avidite.”

Biology is complex, and the life science tool kit continues to expand to meet the challenge of that complexity taking us into the world of multi omics and beyond. Today we talk about 3D genomics and what this additional three-dimensional structural information is telling not just researchers, but clinicians, particularly in oncology.

Today we talk with Simon Fredriksson, CEO and co-founder of Pixelgen Technologies, a company just out of stealth offering spatial technology that maps cellular surface proteins at the single cell level. Called molecular pixelation, the breakthrough technology is designed to first target immune cells.

Editor's Note: Theral's mic malfunctioned in this interview. Fortunately the not as good backup mic did work and John has a good mic.  Our apologies. John Greally joins us today. He is the founding Director of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Center for Epigenomics. He’s a pediatrician and a clinical geneticist with appointments in both at Einstein.

Last month the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) took a quite remarkable step, putting out a formal statement of apology for its past history of involvement with eugenics. Some say it’s long overdue while some of us didn’t know about this history.

23andMe occupies its own place in the world of genomics. Known for its vision to democratize human genomic information, the company has always gone big and bold, and sometimes controversial. Today we don’t hear much controversy—is that because their approach has won out? In any case, they have certainly achieved a scale that surpasses any other genetic testing company.

Remember all those firsts for synthetic biology that we heard about coming from Craig Venter’s company, Synthetic Genomics in San Diego? The first genome of a whole organism transplanted. First genome synthesized. First synthetic life created.

Oncology has emerged as the most successful disease area for precision medicine. Last year, as the genetic testing industry went through a royal shake-up brought on mostly by external market forces, it's been no surprise that precision oncology has been touted as a core strength. As the industry now works "to be more lean and profitable"--new language one hears these days, cancer testing will be a big part of that effort.

To begin the year, we head across the pond for an outlook on the thriving community of synthetic biology in the United Kingdom. Paul Freemont was a co-author of the UK's synthetic biology roadmap and co-directs SynbiCITE, the national center for the commercialization of synthetic biology. A few years ago the government put an initial investment of $300 million pounds into the field, and "everything was going swimmingly well," says Paul. "Then COVID happened."